Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Illustrator as Art Director - ICON7

Being the president of the upcoming ICON Conference, I had the amazing opportunity to art direct the ICON7 poster design. The theme of the conference is collaboration and the power of community, as represented by headline... Drawn Together. (Credit to board member Mark Todd for that beautiful piece of copy writing!) So, I wanted to create a poster that represented a collaboration: A two-sided poster that was an unusual collision between a design-ustrator and illu-signer. Ideally, I wanted each of the artists to influence the work of the other, if not co-create some of the elements.

My first choices were Jessica Hische and Chris Buzelli- total dream team... but perhaps unlikely pairs for something like this. One phone call and they were on board!

Here was my big idea in sketch form that I sent to the artists. Thankfully, at this point, I'm really in the backseat of the process of making these images. (Just like any good art director, right?) So grateful to these amazing artists donating their time to a great organization that promotes the illustration community. They took a silly scrap of an idea and made it way better than anything I could come up with alone.

I'll leave it to Chris and Jessica to post more images from the process, but I do want to show the best part of the collaborative design and illustration process, in my mind.

Chris actually designed the letterforms for the headline and took a shot at painting them, but Jessica thought sharper type would look better. So she took the baton and crushed it as usual with her uncanny vector-whispering.

I would not be prouder of this poster even if I had made the image myself. I see why art directors really love their job. What fun to set great pieces on the board and let the game play on!